National Updates from BMA

GP Contract webinars and guidance 

Last month the GPC England officer team delivered a series of webinars outlining the changes and funding to the 2025/26 GP contract. Thousands of you joined the presentation and question and answer sessions. If you missed out, you can still catch up by watching the webinar recording and view the slide deck here.

BMA continues to update the guidance on the 2025/26 contract changes.

Advice and Guidance Enhanced Service

As part of the new GMS contract for 2025/26, an Enhanced Service specification for Advice and Guidance (A&G) will provide a £20 Item of Service fee (IoS) per ‘pre-referral’ A&G request. Please keep an eye out for BMA’s imminent guidance.

Rejecting unnecessary proformas and forms

Read also guidance on rejecting unnecessary proformas and forms, which create additional workload, delayed patient care, and unnecessary bureaucracy for GP practices – when a relevant, factual referral letter would suffice. Read guidance.

Although the national dispute with Government is over, the importance of local bargaining, collaboration and agreement to resolve ongoing commissioning gaps continues through our ‘Mind the Gap’ campaign. Read the latest updates here

Please also continue to refer to safe working guidance, which includes template letters which help practices manage workload and limit capacity to deliver safe, high-quality care.

AI in General Practice 

Following a busy week which saw a series of announcements generate a renewed focus on the role of AI in general practice, GPC has developed this brief note ahead of more substantial guidance aimed at supporting practices to meet their regulatory obligations. BMA will be sharing a more detailed document in time.

GP Connect and e-consult contract changes

Following the agreement of the 2025/26 GMS contract, a new requirement will come into place in October 2025 mandating practices to provide some external parties with the ability to submit information to the GP record and, in some limited cases, access information within the record. While much of the detail of this requirement is still to be determined, BMA has produced an FAQs document to speak to some of the more pressing questions heard from members

Similarly, the scope of e-consult platforms is expected to expand as patients will have a wider range of ways to access and engage with GP services. Please see an FAQs on that change here.

OpenSAFELY

You may have seen an email this week from NHS England to all practice managers and GP partners/contractors about the expansion of the OpenSAFELY secure data service. GPC England has long advocated for using OpenSAFELY more widely, and BMA is aware that the plan is to now cautiously expand to cover non-COVID analyses.

The Joint GP IT Committee with input from the BMA and RCGP supports OpenSAFELY, as the team led by Professor Ben Goldacre have managed to develop robust methods for privacy and transparency which protect GPs as data controllers for the GP record:

Users don’t need to interact directly with pseudonymised patient records to run their analyses. All actions in the platform are publicly logged, in real time with the pseudonymised data remaining within the electronic health record system your practice uses, and the practice continues to be the data controller. Analyses run remotely through the OpenSAFELY platform, with NHS England acting as data controller for the service, once the initial queries of the pseudonymised data have occurred. Only aggregate information will leave the platform.

There will be a follow-up email from NHS England about the Direction in a couple of weeks, which is the point when you will be asked to press a button to acknowledge receipt and BMA will communicate more with you at this stage around the next steps which will need to be taken.

Shared care prescribing principles

BMA has now published Shared care prescribing principles. Shared care prescribing refers to medication which is initiated by a specialist and ongoing prescribing and monitoring is shared with a GP practice, usually accompanied by guidance or a shared care agreement. The principles that apply to shared care prescribing are:

• It is a non-core voluntary activity that can be declined by the GP practice for any reason
• The practice is satisfied with the quality assurance and clinical governance of the specialist provider
• If any ongoing medication monitoring is required, responsibility for this should be clear within associated guidance in the form of a shared care agreement
• The appropriate stabilisation period has occurred before prescribing is handed over to the GP
• There is enduring specialist input
• Any additional work undertaken by general practice in the form of medication monitoring, is delivered through a funded, commissioned pathway

Read the full guidance: Prescribing in general practice

Structure of GPCs and how they interact with LMCs

BMA has published a video explaining the structures of the BMA’s GP Committees (GPCs) and how they interact with LMCs.

Find out more information about the GPCs: BMA general practitioners committee UK overview

Maximise your chances or job success

3 June 2025

Join the virtual workshop designed to help you navigate the GP job market with confidence. The interactive event is designed to support ST3 GP registrars, sessional GPs seeking new or additional roles or hours, GPs qualified outside the UK looking for their first NHS roles, GPs returning to practice after a career break, and First5 GPs. Discover the support and resources available from the BMA and other organisations to aid your job search. Register to attend here

GPC England regional elections 2025 results

The elections for the regional seats on GPCE which were up for election have now concluded. The below candidates have been elected for three-year terms starting from June 2025 to June 2028.

Local Matters

Cambs LMC Virtual Open Meeting – Tue 29 April 2025

Cambs LMC will be hosting a virtual Open Meeting on Tuesday 29 April at 7pm, delivering a briefing on the ‘2025/26 National GP Contract & Local Commissioning Briefing’. A next steps discussion focusing on:

• What’s new?
• 2025/26 GP Contract
• 2025/26 Local Commissioning Arrangements
• Next Steps
• Questions

Register here

Local Commissioning Agreement

The ICB Local Commissioning Agreement has been sent out with an extended sign-up deadline of 30 April 2025. Thank you to practices who have already sent in questions in to us. In light of the changes to the agreement which now pays for more services on a tariff basis we would encourage practices to use this time to review the funding offer against their practice populations and cost of providing the services. Please send any further questions or queries to office@cambslmc.org and we will collate responses and provide feedback over the next couple of weeks and at the Open Meeting.

National BMA Update 

Local action: Stay safe, stay organised, stay united

GPC England’s national dispute with Government may be over, following the acceptance of the 2025/26 contract, but the importance of local action to resolve ongoing commissioning gaps continues. Read the BMA’s latest local action guidance on their GP campaign page.

The BMA continue to strongly advocate for safe working and encourage practices to identify unfunded and underfunded work in their areas and to engage in local action to address commissioning gaps. When locally commissioned pathways fail or there are service gaps, practices should initiate re/negotiations, via their elected LMC representatives, with ICBs to secure appropriate resourcing.

Practices who are undertaking under/unfunded work should either be fully resourced, to ensure patient care – for some of the most vulnerable people in society – is sustainable, or, with the support of their LMC, consider serving notice to ICBs. LMCs are integral to facilitating fair and effective local agreements between practices and commissioners – supported by BMA national advice and resources. This is simply business as usual local action, coordinated by your LMCs, which has been happening for many years.

The BMA safe working guidance continues to be GPC England policy and is regularly updated. New planned 2025/26 contractual asks, such as patient access to e-consultations for routine care as well as requesting fit notes or medication queries, does not mean GP practices must offer unlimited capacity that jeopardises patient or staff safety.  The safe working guidance includes template letters which help practices manage workload and limit capacity to deliver safe, high-quality care.

All colleagues are encourage to read GPC England’s guidance on the 2025/26 contract changes, where further additional related guidance will be added in the coming days and weeks.

GP Contract Webinars 2025

All colleagues are invited to join the BMA to hear the GPC England Officer team discuss the detail of the changes in the GP Contract and its funding for 2025/26. After the presentation there will be time for questions and answers.

• Wednesday 9 April           19:00-21:00                        Register here
• Thursday 10 April             12:00-14:00                        Register here
• Wednesday 23 April        19:00-21:00                        Register here
• Thursday 24 April             12:30-14:30                        Register here

Read more about the contract changes, BMA advice and the webinars: GP contract 2025/26 changes

National Insurance Contributions Bill

The Government has continued to reject Lords amendments to the National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Bill which would potentially exempt GPs from ENICs (Employers National Insurance Contributions) increases. They have used the reason that the Lords Amendment ‘interferes with the public revenue’ which is inappropriate as the elected chamber The Commons has final say on tax and financial issues (a position dating from the Parliament Act 1911) and has used its majority to push the Bill through. The Bill will now receive Royal Assent, becoming law on 3 April 2025.

Over half of GPs in England have missing years of pensions data

BMA’s recent Freedom of Information request has revealed that 56% of GPs in England have missing pensions records up to 2022/23, with 156,896 years of pension data missing in total. This matters because without your pension record being up to date you cannot determine potential tax charges and whether you can increase work without penalty, nor make informed decisions about your pension savings. This is also important for those affected by the McCloud remedy. The BMA have highlighted Capita’s failures in the media and calling for an urgent solution to this significant issue.

The BMA continue to meet with Capita, NHS BSA and NHSE to put pressure on them, and although we had verbal commitment that they will write to affected members with specific personalised information in relation to missing years in pension records, no timeline was provided. Whilst the BMA firmly believe this is a problem that Capita, NHS BSA and NHSE need to work together to resolve, you can also take action to make sure your record is up to date and encourage you to do so and the BMA have produced step-by-step guidance to help you.

GP pressures

The Sessional GP Committee (SGPC) has opened voting for 16 elected members of the committee. Election counting rules will be applied to ensure that a candidate will be elected from each of the committee’s thirteen regions. The committee’s regions are based on the BMA’s ten English regional councils, in addition to one representative in each of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Voting will close at 12pm on Monday 14^th April 2025. For more information on these elections, please visit the BMA Sessional GP Committee webpage.

Rotational training survey

The BMA, as part of the pay offer to English Resident Doctors, has agreed to undertake a review into rotational training with the UK Government. Additionally, the BMA is in discussions regarding reforms of rotational training in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that are separate to this review. Rotational training is the current form of training whereby resident doctors ‘rotate’ between trusts/health boards and, in many cases, employers across their training programme.

In order to ensure the BMA can achieve the best possible reforms to the system, we are asking GPs who are educational clinical supervisors to respond to some questions about the role. The survey asks about the rotational training system from your view as an educational clinical supervisor for rotating doctors, which will inform how the BMA can deliver substantive, useful changes. Take the survey here.

GP focus group – primary care provision for refugees and asylum seekers project

As part of a project to improve the provision of primary healthcare to people seeking asylum and refugees, the BMA’s International team will be holding a focus group online on 4 June 2025, 14:30-16:30. Input from the group will help lobby the government to better support doctors in providing high-quality healthcare, and inform updates to the BMA’s Refugee and Asylum Seeker Patient Health Toolkit.

If you would like to attend the focus group or find out more, contact info.international@bma.org.uk.